From: "Swisher, Bob" <bswisher@ou.edu>
To: "'it-fyi@listserv.ou.edu'" <it-fyi@lists.ou.edu>
Subject: it-fyi: Web Skills, Tenure, Teaching (Chron of Higher Ed)
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1999 11:46:26 -0600
With Web Skills -- and Now Tenure -- a Professor Focuses on Teaching
By LISA GUERNSEY
Washington
Randy Bass was taking a risk, and he knew it.
As an assistant professor of English at Georgetown University, Mr. Bass
had redesigned one of his American literature courses to incorporate
hypertext and the Internet. He had also started a massive World-Wide Web
site, called Crossroads (http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/), to
enable instructors to share both on-line teaching materials and stories
of how they had used them. He was fascinated with exploring ways in
which new technologies could help students learn.
There was only one problem: Mr. Bass didn't have tenure. And like many
assistant professors who are trying to integrate technology into their
teaching, he knew that many tenure-and-promotion committees would look
askance at the kinds of choices he had made -- both because he had spent
so much time on new technology and because he had focused more on
teaching than on traditional research.
"I decided I would stop pretending that I was going to write a
traditional scholarly monograph on 19th-century American literature and
at the same time continue to work on the technology projects," he said
in a keynote address (http://www.georgetown.edu/bassr/disc&pub.html) at
a recent conference convened by the American Association for Higher
Education. "I chose the latter."
What's more, when he presented his work to his tenure-review committee,
he used technology to highlight his teaching experiences. He created an
on-line "course portfolio" -- a Web site that provided detailed
descriptions of why he taught the course the way he did, and what he
learned from the experience.
To his surprise, the strategy worked. When the time finally came for his
tenure review, his colleagues appeared to be persuaded that his work as
a teacher should be valued. He received tenure last spring.
Word of his success spread. Mr. Bass -- a laid-back professor with a
closely trimmed beard and a silver hoop earring in his left ear -- has
been cited by many fledgling scholars who are considering whether to
take some of the same risks.
He is now using his experiences as a springboard for talking about new
ways of evaluating and defining instruction, technology tools, and
scholarship. He says the Internet makes teaching -- whether it includes
Web-based syllabi or hypertextual student projects -- more public than
ever before. In some ways, he argues, teaching on line is a form of
publication.
But simply calling teaching "publication" isn't going to persuade a
tenure committee that you've got what it takes to earn tenure, Mr. Bass
adds. Tenure-track professors need to start thinking about the
"scholarship of teaching," he says.
He says the phrase is borrowed from Lee S. Shulman, president of the
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, who has advocated
that teachers take a rigorous look at what they are doing, investigating
and reflecting on that as a research subject.
Mr. Bass's portfolio (http://www.georgetown.edu/bassr/portfolio/amlit/),
for instance, provides hyperlinks to the on-line components of his
introductory course on American literary traditions. It also explains
why he planned the syllabi the way he did, why he assigned specific
projects, and what he learned from students' reactions to them. He has
now become a vocal advocate of using such portfolios to illustrate what
a professor has learned in teaching.
"To fully legitimate teaching and technology, especially in the reward
process, there needs to be this reflective dimension," Mr. Bass says.
His next challenge, he says, is to get other professors, deans, and
provosts to understand how teaching with technology can become a
scholarly endeavor -- and to encourage tenure-track professors to try
the same route he did.
Mr. Bass's most recent speaking engagement was at the A.A.H.E.'s January
conference on faculty issues, where he outlined how on-line course
portfolios can become a more integral part of the tenure process. He is
one of 15 scholars chosen for the Pew Scholars National Fellowship
Program, a new Carnegie Foundation project that focuses on the
profession of teaching. As a Pew Scholar, Mr. Bass is expected to
continue investigating and writing about the research he is conducting
in the classroom.
He has already contributed an essay about his work to The Course
Portfolio: How Faculty Can Examine Their Teaching to Advance Practice
and Improve Student Learning, a book published by the A.A.H.E. late last
year.
Course portfolios, Mr. Bass readily acknowledges, don't have to employ
technology. Most are created by arranging photocopied examples of
syllabi and students' work in spiral notebooks, along with summaries and
annotations about what helped students learn and what didn't. For the
last few years, Mr. Shulman and others at the Carnegie Foundation and
the A.A.H.E. have been promoting such portfolios as one way to bring all
kinds of teaching under the lens of peer review.
For Mr. Bass, though, creating a Web-based portfolio was critical. His
work was on line, and his experiments focused on technology. In his
portfolio, readers can click on buttons that open up smaller windows on
the screen, providing quick notes about why certain books were chosen
and grouped together on the syllabus.
"To the extent that teaching gets reported, documented, and displayed on
Web sites like Randy's, it becomes community property -- and that is a
prerequisite to scholarship," says the Carnegie Foundation's Mr.
Shulman. "I think that technology is going to make the scholarship of
teaching possible in ways that would have been very difficult without
it."
Mr. Bass and scholars at the foundation say that so far only a few
professors have created on-line course portfolios, but they hope the
idea will catch on. Tenure-track professors, they say, are becoming more
concerned than ever about how they will incorporate and evaluate new
technologies in their classrooms without endangering their tenure bids.
"There is a lot of energy out there to bring these two things together,"
Mr. Bass says. "But there aren't that many people who have lived it
yet."
Background stories from The Chronicle:
"On-Line 'Expo' Points Scholars to New American-Studies Resources,"
5/1/98
"Carnegie Foundation Sets Up Think Tank to Help Professors Improve
Teaching," 3/13/98
"Those Who Publish on Line Fear They Suffer in Tenure Reviews," 6/6/97
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